this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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What a useless headline. God forbid they just give the actual capacity rather than some abstract, bullshit, flexible measure that means nothing to anyone.
I'm not even making this up ....
The US really will do anything to avoid using metric lol
Canada geese are metric tho…
Our ongoing war with Canadian geese are actually the reason why we didn't convert to metric. The geese have a harder time converting their flight paths if we list things in imperial.
Canada geese are whatever the fuck they want.
That's hilarious.
That's to be interesting for readers.
It also stands out a lot more than using meters. And gets people to talk about the ridiculous unit of measurement. In short, it drives engagement, which is the point of the title these days.
I especially like it when they use airplanes to illustrate weight. “… the same as 15 Boeing 747 jumbo jets”. Airplanes are made to be as light as possible, they go to extreme lengths to save as much weight as they can. As such, a 747 is much lighter than most objects of similar size. People have no intuition of the weight of such large objects to begin with, but then they add to it by using something that is much lighter than you’d expect.
200TB
Woah, I can't wait to never afford that!
So like, 5-6 uncompressed 4k movies
It's larger than 6 olympic swimming pools and fits in my pants.
They have to make it as accessible a headline as possible, especially when most don't read past the headline anyway these days. The average person probably doesn't have much of an idea as to what 125TB looks like in real world use.
I'd argue that most people would have a better idea of what 125TB looks like than knowing the size of a 4k movie file, let alone 14,000 of them. They can at least compare 125TB to their 500GB/1TB phone/computer storage.
Not to mention there's nearly 10x difference in bitrate between 4K streaming video and actual 4K HDR off a bluray. The only people who know how big a 4K video is these days are nerds and pirates, because it's not like Netflix tells you.
But bigger number mean more better
It does 89 285 714.3 floppy discs
Most people aren't tech savvy, and industry acronyms chase them away.
On the other hand, a movie is something everyone can understand.
You can understand it but you can't interpret the value. How many movies is a CD? Or a DVD? Or a 1TB SSD? Or even Avatar in 3D (presumably not 1)? How many movies have even been released in total/last year?
The number awes non-tech savvy folk but it doesn't really inform them of anything. You could just as well write "more movies than you will ever need".
And besides that, I personally think that news should try to educate folk. I'm completely fine with a comparison in the article. But why in the headline?
If it wasn't an effective marketing tactic Apple wouldn't have used it as a metric on their tablets and ipods.
Not really. A 4K movie means nothing to 99% of people. Is it 4GB? 40? 400? How many can my phone hold? Or my computer?
This only makes things more understandable if you use a point of reference that everyone you're talking to is familiar with. The fact that they had to then explain how big a 4K movie is in the article clearly shows that even they know that this doesn't help people. It's just a big flashy number.
Just for context, I'm a writer, I understand the point of using these abstract measures to give a frame of reference. But in this case, just giving the capacity in GB/TB would have been easier to understand. It just wouldn't have been as sensational of a headline.
It would seem attractive for me 20 years ago - as in funny and colorful. A little bit like Neal Stephenson's writing in Cryptonomicon.
The problem is that various kinds of storage are something completely mundane today, and that particular thing is not going to reach us anytime soon, and BR is not too common as well.
And the initial association with optical discs for me is about scratches. Maybe if those were distributed in protective cases like with floppies, they'd live longer.